history

1966

by

The February 2006 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education is out. Look for it in your favorite school of architecture.

Why? Because this issue is edited by George Dodds of University of Tennessee, Knoxville and myself. Hatched at Jacques-Imo’s in the Riverbend/Carrollton area of uptown New Orleans in September 2004, this issue looks back, to 1966, 40 years after Robert Stern put together the seminal 40 under 40 exhibit. An interview with Stern about the show is a highlight, as are Simon Sadler’s essay “Drop City Revisited,” Hadas Steiner’s “Brutalism Exposed. Photography and the Zoom Wave,” Mary Lou Lobsinger’s “The New Urban Scale in Italy. On Aldo Rossi’s L’architettura della citt?ɬ†,” Stanley Mathews’s “The Fun Palace as Virtual Architecture. Cedric Price and the Practices of Indeterminacy,” and Peter L. Laurence’s “Contradictions and Complexities. Jane Jacobs’s and Robert Venturi’s Complexity Theories.” In the book reviews section, Andrew Ballentyne reviews Sadler’s The Situationist City and Patrick Harrop reviews the CCA’s The Sixties: Montreal Thinks Big.
Technorati Tags: 1966, architecture, cities, history, 1960s

No More Ambassador Hotel

by

Los Angeles's Ambassador Hotel is gone. I hate to say that I never had a connection with the place, but I didn't. I came to Los Angeles after it was shuttered and saw it only as the object of a longstanding attempt to preserve it. What fascinates me about the destruction of the hotel is that the fixtures from the pantry, in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was shot, ar being preserved, have been packed into two steel containers as part of an agreement with the school district. Nobody seems to want them, least of all the Kennedys. Technorati Tags: historic preservation, history, los angeles